New for VS Code: Support for JUnit, HDInsight PySpark, Python and R for Azure Data Lake

Microsoft's Visual Studio Code team ships new releases monthly, but new features are also continually being provided via other means, such as extensions. Here's a look at some brand-new functionality just announced this week.

JUnit Support for Visual Studio Code
Just today, the Visual Studio Engineering Team announced JUnit support for the popular, open source, cross-platform code editor via a new entrant in the tool's Java extension family.

ADL Tools for VS Code Support for Python and R Programming
Yesterday, the Microsoft Azure team announced support for Azure Data Lake (ADL) Python and R extensions within VS Code.

"This means you can easily add Python or R scripts as custom code extensions in U-SQL scripts, and submit such scripts directly to ADL with one click," Jenny Jiang, principal program manager on the Big Data team, said. "For data scientists who value the productivity of Python and R, ADL Tools for VS Code offers a fast and powerful code editing solution. VS Code makes it simple to get started and provides easy integration with U-SQL for data extract, data processing and data output."

Earlier this week, Jiang also announced VS Code integration with HDInsight PySpark. This enables developers to edit Python scripts and submit PySpark statements to HDInsight clusters.

"For PySpark developers who value productivity of Python language, VS Code HDInsight Tools offer you a quick Python editor with simple getting started experiences, and enable you to submit PySpark statements to HDInsight clusters with interactive responses," Jiang said. "This interactivity brings the best properties of Python and Spark to developers and empowers you to gain faster insights."

She listed its key customer benefits as:

Interactive responses brings the best properties of Python and Spark with flexibility to execute one or multiple statements